Governance advocates see crowd-sourcing as way to fix Internet ills

FRANKFURT Nov 6 (Reuters) - Responding to a dizzying array
of issues that threaten to break the Internet, from privacy to
tax dodging to cybercrime, a group of the world's leading
governance organisations say greater user involvement, not
top-down control, is needed.

Three organisations -- Brazil's Internet Steering Committee
(CGI.br), Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) -- said on Thursday
they were setting up a new group to find solutions to Internet
governance issues, instead of waiting for governments to agree.

NETmundial, as the group will be known, will map out best
practices for resolving complex problems, ranging from online
privacy to Internet taxation, security and child protection.

The group plans to turn to the Internet's own models of
crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding that power web institutions
such as Wikipedia to turn decade-old debates among top
international technical organisations into action plans.

"Current governance processes are deeply challenged by the
transnational nature of the Internet and the speed at which it
moves," ICAAN Chief Executive Fadi Chehadé said in an interview.
ICANN is a global body that manages the Internet address system.

The border-hopping nature of the Internet can be summed up
by the example of a U.S. consumer who buys a phone in Baltimore
from a German headquartered company and uses it to pay for goods
from an ecommerce site in Hong Kong. Myriad issues from privacy
to security to taxes can arise even in such simple scenarios.

Even as the Internet becomes deeply woven into the fabric of
many people's daily lives, its interconnected nature has come
under attack from interests which feel threatened by its
openness, or who look to exploit its technical weaknesses.

Seeking to fill these breaches, government officials, courts
and regulators are pressing for all manner of local, national
and regional controls that increasingly slice up and balkanise
the network of networks that is the global Internet.
Continuación...